Precious Arinze, “Exercises for Dealing with News of a Child Marriage Somewhere”

A.Define loss in the following topics:

The pieces were pieces before everything broke.

There is a relativity to what culture you can call

yours/theirs alone.

To spread a disease, dip it in the Holy word, hide it

under a veil, exhume a twelve-year-old girl

collapsing back into her mother’s eyes, tear-

stained henna distilling love and innocence,

Asalam alaikum escaping somewhere out

of sight.

B.Identify the sources:

They carcass long before we bury their bodies.

A wedding ceremony for a girl to lie down

and decay in.

C.Imagine all other possible scenarios:

The girl takes one piece, carries her hymen to

the top of a hill in the desert.

If we send anger and outrage to join her there,

if the desert sun scorches her up,

if the sun lends a currency back to us,

if the currency exchanges for justice,

for religion,

if religion and justice are bargains on hot coals,

if hot coals are childlike feet running across

a country to a God they can swallow,

if the country was enough to keep her safe…

Think of a wall with water tirelessly seeping into it.

Think of the double sensation.

The hard softness.

Envision the eventual crumble, like a burdened womb

expelling life.

D.Answer the following questions:

If John the Baptist must come before Jesus,

what comes after marital rape and VVF?

What precedes the funeral of girlhood receding

faster than it arrives?

Why do men carve graveyards to bury their seeds

out of the bodies of little girls?

E. Craft a version of what the girl does next:

When the midwife hands the girl her daughter, she will

bathe her tears, run out and drown her in the river —

an understanding that water can be more forgiving

than men’s hands, than poverty pillaged by faith

than crime scenes that aren’t yet, but soon will be

her body too.

F. Breathing exercises:

Inhale. The girl wants to be nothing but wind,

nothing but what trees bow to,

nothing but…

Her pieces stay pieces after everything breaks.

Say you fracture your humanity, the cracks lead away from

the desert, a piece of you gets trapped in…

Exhale.

Repeat until calm enough to maybe live with yourself.

Precious Arinze is a Nigerian Poet, freelance writer and undergraduate student of Law at the University of Benin. She aspires to have a professional career that exclusively involves eating, someday. Her work has appeared in Mikrokosmos, Kalahari Review, Brittle paper, and is forthcoming elsewhere.